Padula: Are we really sure cannabis leads to impaired driving?

By Gregg Padula gpadula@wickedlocal.com

Thursday

Sep 6, 2018 at 7:38 AM

I wasn’t planning to write a column exploring whether there’s a correlation between cannabis consumption and auto collisions. However, that recently changed after a television public service announcement caught my attention.

The new “Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over” campaign hit television and the internet the end of August. It doesn’t name a specific substance, but the vague language would suggest they’re aiming at cannabis because that’s what’s happening now in our state.

Just about everyone can get behind a campaign promoting sober driving, and I believe it’s very important to remind drivers of the repercussions of driving impaired. Its validity is not the issue. The issue is that it was created through a partnership between cannabis retailers and the driving companies Lyft and Uber.

The video itself is simply a series of people delivering dramatic words. The absolute most despicable line comes from a man who I guess is referring to stoners, even though cannabis or marijuana are never mentioned directly. He says with zero conviction, “You could kill my mom or yours, my daughter, my sister, my love, my life and yours.” This is a new low for the industry.

So, beyond the propaganda, is there actually a reason to panic, or is this just another play on the fear of individuals seen as easy prey for alarmists?

There have been many studies involving cannabis and its effects on humans, but its illegal federal status prevents government funding for testing and research, making it an easy place to harbor hearsay until it sounds like truth. Misinformation has been a powerful and effective tool in shaping public opinion on cannabis. The plant’s mystery is responsible for its malleability in possessing the ability to fit into any argument, true or not.

National studies on cannabis’ influence on driving have been split, making them easy to contort, often tailored to display increases in all the dangerously presumptive areas people would like to see to fit their agenda. Due to the vagueness of some of the studies conducted, it makes them very easy to manipulate to reach a certain conclusion, but do not address variables.

For example, on the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s website, it states, “Marijuana is the illicit drug most frequently found in the blood of drivers who have been involved in vehicle crashes, including fatal ones.”

I don’t negate this at all. However, an important variable seems to have been overlooked – the fact that cannabis stays in your body up to 30 days after use, as opposed to drugs such as heroin and cocaine, which typically leave the body in a couple days. It’s pretty clear that the National Institute on Drug Abuse doesn’t list that variable for the simple fact that it would give far too much perspective to those sold on their scare tactics.

Cannabis, and its true influence on one’s ability to drive is potentially the largest unknown data field concerning lawmakers, regulators and other motor vehicles. Most widespread studies present data on driving and impairment with alcohol and illicit drugs – there are minimal, if any, valid studies that focus solely on cannabis.

For law enforcement, this is a tricky area. Without accurate roadside tools to detect THC levels, police largely rely on field sobriety tests developed to fight drunk driving as a means of gauging whether you are under the influence of cannabis – even though the two share almost no similarities.

Eager to monopolize on this new industry, many have attempted to create an accurate roadside breathalyzer test that can sense whether you smoked cannabis up to three hours previous. California company Hound Lab, Inc. claims it has invented an accurate machine, and Massachusetts is actually slated to be the first to use it.

If it’s this hard to identify whether an individual has been consuming cannabis, can it even be considered impairment? This is a slippery slope. The last thing law enforcement needs are new rules requiring them to administer roadside cannabis tests without evidence that they’re necessary.

We are in the throes of the worst opiate epidemic in history, so that’s what they’ve been focusing on. Are we really going to let this work fall to the wayside in order to appease the panic of a very small population of alarmists and online trolls? There are real problems that require much more attention than predictions and hypothetical theories.

Gregg Padula is an employee of GateHouse Media New England. He has experience in several areas of the cannabis industry, and now serves as an advocate for both patients' and workers’ rights. He can be reached at gpadula@wickedlocal.com.